This is edition 2025/112 of the Ten@10 newsletter.
Welcome back. It's 2025 and 20 years since I started writing about politics and anything else that took my fancy. Thank to my VIP members for making this site what it is today. In July we will be having a 20th birthday celebration. Stay tuned for more announcements.
This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.
Enjoy!
1. The Politics, and Politicians, of Nostalgia.
Chris Trotter
- 🕰️ Nostalgia in Politics: When the present is challenging, politicians often look to the past for guidance, hoping that past policies will provide solutions to today's problems.
- 💼 Willis and Treasury: Finance Minister Nicola Willis has asked Treasury to focus on assertive advice, moving away from Jacinda Ardern’s "wellbeing" approach to a more hard-nosed, neoliberal stance.
- 🧑🎓 Willis’s Neoliberal Revival: Despite being too young to have experienced the full neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, Willis shows a strong affinity for the ideological clarity and decisiveness of past finance ministers like Ruth Richardson.
- 🔄 Nostalgia's Risks: There's a danger in "vicarious nostalgia" where people yearn for policies of the past without understanding why those policies were implemented or how times have changed.
- 💭 Act Party's Optimism: Unlike National’s hesitant approach, Act’s leadership, particularly David Seymour and Brooke van Velden, sees neoliberalism as a promising future, not something to look back on.
- ↩️ NZ First’s Backward Look: NZ First, led by Winston Peters, focuses on nostalgia for the past, particularly colonial-era economics, rejecting modern challenges like climate change and global cooperation.
- 🏞️ Jones's Colonial Views: Shane Jones, despite his Labour background, advocates for a traditional, extraction-driven view of economic progress, resisting modern environmentalism.
- 🌏 Peters and the Pacific: Peters’s political vision is rooted in an outdated Cold War mentality, viewing New Zealand's role in the Pacific as one of dominance and control, rather than cooperation.
- 🏋️♂️ Teddy Roosevelt’s Legacy: Political nostalgia isn't always misplaced—like Roosevelt's "big stick" philosophy, modern politics can still rely on strong, assertive actions in certain global matters.
